Oleksiy Tolochko’s Concept and the Origin of the Short Pravda Russkaia

A wide circle of historians, lawyers, and secondary school teachers are interested in the Pravda Russkaia. This review analyses the historiographical situation around the study of this important artefact after the publication of The Short Pravda: The Origin of the Text (2009) by Oleksiy Tolochko, in which the author develops the opinion that the Short Pravda appeared later than the Expanded Pravda, which was expressed by prominent linguists and historians (E. F. Karskii, S. P. Obnorskii, A. I. Sobolevskii, etc.) in the first half of the twentieth century but later discarded by Soviet scholarship. By combining various methods from source studies, the author proves that the Short Pravda did not originate as a legal document in the eleventh century, but as a fragment of The Chronicle of Novgorod in the early fifteenth century. The review shows that specialists’ responses to Tolochko’s book are limited to a few journal publications, each of which criticises one or two of separate arguments but does not systematically consider the proposed holistic theory of the artefact’s origin (articles by K. Zukerman, P. V. Lukin, A. A. Gorskii, A. Y. Degtyarev, etc.). Any attempt at summarising the results of the controversy leads to the belief that the discussion is methodologically unsound. The analysis of an article from the Pravda that is taken out of context can lead to opposing interpretations depending on the choice of the parameters preferred by a given author at a given time. Considering the fundamental nature of the Pravda Russkaia for the history of medieval Russia, the reviewer concludes that it is necessary to make an effort (probably a collective effort) towards a systematic analysis of Tolochko’s hypothesis: the traditional isolated study of this most important legal document should be placed within the broader framework of a comprehensive study of the collections in which the short and expanded versions of the Pravda have been preserved.

Pulling our lens backwards to move forward: an integrated approach to physician distress

The medical community has recently acknowledged physician stress as a leading issue for individual wellness and healthcare system functioning. Unprecedented levels of stress contribute to physician burnout, leaves of absence and early retirement. Although recommendations have been made, we continue to struggle with addressing stress. One challenge is a lack of a shared definition for what we mean by ‘stress’, which is a complex and idiosyncratic phenomenon that may be examined from a myriad of angles. As such, research on stress has traditionally taken a reductionist approach, parsing out one aspect to investigate, such as stress physiology. In the medical domain, we have traditionally underappreciated other dimensions of stress, including emotion and the role of the environmental and sociocultural context in which providers are embedded. Taking a complementary, holistic approach to stress and focusing on the composite, subjective individual experience may provide a deeper understanding of the phenomenon and help to illuminate paths towards wellness. In this review article, we first examine contributions from unidimensional approaches to stress, and then outline a complementary, integrated approach. We describe how complex phenomena have been tackled in other domains and discuss how holistic theory and the humanities may help in studying and addressing physician stress, with the ultimate goal of improving physician well-being and consequently patient care.

The Holistic Theory of Unpleasant Symptoms

This article describes a holistic revisioning of symptom theory for nursing practice. The Holistic Theory of Unpleasant Symptoms (HTOUS), informed by the Science of Unitary Human Beings, describes the complexity of symptom experience and how nursing actions can be associated with its transformation. Existing theories of unpleasant symptoms which broadly describe the antecedents, characteristics, and consequences of symptoms, have been reconceptualized from holistic and integral perspectives. Applying integral concepts such as human energy field and pattern manifestation expands understanding of both symptom experience and the nurse’s response to it. Spirituality is an addition to symptom theory, being seen as a characteristic of Human Energy Field pattern manifestations. The theory’s major concepts are symptom experience manifestations and wellbecoming manifestations. Concepts of the sustaining presence of the nurse and voluntary mutual patterning are explored. Pain, nausea, dyspnea, anxiety, despair, and other symptoms are discussed. Because HTOUS is acausal and nonlinear, it is widely applicable to creative, theory-directed nursing practice and research. Recommendations are made for practice, research, and further theory development.

The design of self-organizing human–swarm intelligence

Human–swarm interaction is a frontier in the realms of swarm robotics and human-factors engineering. However, no holistic theory has been explicitly formulated that can inform how humans and robot swarms should interact through an interface while considering real-world demands, the relative capabilities of the components, as well as the desired joint-system behaviours. In this article, we apply a holistic perspective that we refer to as joint human–swarm loops, that is, a cybernetic system made of human, swarm and interface. We argue that a solution for human–swarm interaction should make the joint human–swarm loop an intelligent system that balances between centralized and decentralized control. The swarm-amplified human is suggested as a possible design that combines perspectives from swarm robotics, human-factors engineering and theoretical neuroscience to produce such a joint human–swarm loop. Essentially, it states that the robot swarm should be integrated into the human’s low-level nervous system function. This requires modelling both the robot swarm and the biological nervous system as self-organizing systems. We discuss multiple design implications that follow from the swarm-amplified human, including a computational experiment that shows how the robot swarm itself can be a self-organizing interface based on minimal computational logic.

Participatory Feeling: Re-Visioning Transformative Learning Theory Through Heron’s Whole Person Perspective

John Heron’s whole person theory can expand transformative learning theory by elaborating a more nuanced understanding of affect. In contrast to the vague conceptualization of affect’s role and the interchangeable treatment of emotion and feeling in most adult learning scholarship, Heron’s holistic theory grounds all experience in affective knowing and asserts significant differences between feeling and emotion. These distinctions challenge transformative learning theory by revealing critical subjectivity, emerging from affective, embodied experience, as prerequisite to critical reflection and presenting unitive discourse, over rational discourse, as a more viable, generative path to transformations of being. Throughout, I consider how the urgent need to develop deeper understanding around participatory feeling, in particular, relates to complex global issues like the ongoing struggle against racism and for environmental and human rights.

THE ROLE OF PUBLIC ACTIVITY IN THE FORMATION OF NATIONAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF HIGHER EDUCATION

The article presents the results of a study of the impact of public activities on the formation of national identity of higher education students. The urgency of the problem is due to the contradictions, in particular: between the need to preserve the identity of the Ukrainian nation and strengthen the state unity of Ukraine and the lack of proper scientific methodology that makes it possible to develop a holistic theory and effective methods of forming national identity; between the strong educational potential of public activity for the formation of national identity of students and insufficient organizational and methodological support for the implementation of this potential in modern higher education. The purpose of the article is to study the impact of public activities for the formation of national identity of higher education students of the first and second scientific and educational levels. Research methods: analysis, generalization, systematization of psychological and pedagogical, methodical works of scientists, encyclopedic reference books on national education of higher education students of the first and second scientific and educational levels, questionnaires. The scientific novelty of the study is that the author for the first time characterized and tested the impact of public activities on the formation of national identity of higher education. It was proved and experimentally verified in the article that the public activity has a significant impact on the formation of national identity of student youth, because it highlights the need for an effective attitude to the world around, preservation and increase of spiritual and material values of the nation, awareness of responsibility for the nation, its present and future.

Nature’s Role in Outdoor Therapies: An Umbrella Review

Objective: To report on the role of nature in outdoor therapies through review and summary of existing systematic and meta-analytic reviews in an effort to articulate a theoretical framework for practice. Materials and methods: An umbrella review was conducted following systematic protocols PRISMA guidelines. Results: Fourteen studies met the inclusion criteria and represented five self-identified approaches: nature-based therapies, forest therapy, horticultural therapy, wilderness therapy, and adventure therapy. Clear and comprehensive descriptions of theory, program structure, and activity details with causal links to outcomes were mostly absent. Conclusions: A rigorous and determined program of research is required in order to explicit in-depth theories of change in outdoor therapies. Conversely, or maybe concurrently, a holistic theory of integrated relatedness may be developed as a parallel expression of support for nature in therapy while the explanatory science catches up.

Edgar Wind on Experiment and Metaphysics

The paper presents a detailed interpretation of Edgar Wind’s Experiment and Metaphysics (1934), a unique work on the philosophy of physics which broke with the Neo-Kantian tradition under the influence of American pragmatism. Taking up Cassirer’s interpretation of physics, Wind develops a holistic theory of the experiment and a constructivist account of empirical facts. Based on the concept of embodiment which plays a key role in Wind’s later writings on art history, he argues, however, that the outcomes of measurements are contingent. He then proposes an anti-Kantian conception of a metaphysics of nature. For him, nature is an unknown totality which manifests itself in discrepancies between theories and experiment, and hence the theory formation of physics can increasingly approximate the structure of nature. It is shown that this view is ambiguous between a transcendental, metaphysical realism in Kant’s sense and an internal realism in Putnam’s sense. Wind’s central claim is that twentieth century physics offers new options for resolving Kant’s cosmological antinomies. In particular, he connected quantum indeterminism with the possibility of human freedom, a connection that Cassirer sharply opposed.